Just a quick post to see how well Word 2013 RT (included with the Surface RT I picked up at the Microsoft Store in Tyson’s Corner, VA last week) works as a blogging client. So far, the only major app that I use regularly that I really miss on my Surface is Windows Live Writer, which is simply an excellent tool for creating and managing blog posts.

Abstract: In the final part of our Using Blend for Windows 8 apps series, Andrew Duthie and Kirupa Chinnathambi take a look at the Interactive Mode for Blend and demo for us how to style a template using CSS, data binding and more.

Abstract: In Part 2 of our Using Blend for Windows 8 apps series, Andrew Duthie and Kirupa Chinnathambi take a deep dive into how you can use Blend to easily design your Windows 8 apps for various devices. In this episode they’ll show you how to use the device panel and how to react to views and view states.

If you’ve attended one of my talks on building Windows Store apps with HTML5 and JavaScript, you’ve heard me say that although the default for our app templates is to use the WinJS library for providing rich databinding, controls, and a great look and feel that makes your app fit into the Windows store ecosystem, we also support the use of 3rd party JavaScript libraries as well, with a few caveats.

I’m a big fan of reuse wherever possible, so in this 6th installment of my Windows 8: What I’ve Learned series, I’m going to share a tip on how you can essentially get some great features for your app, with very little effort, by leveraging an app that ships with every copy of Windows 8.

The Maps app

Windows 8 machines will ship with several handy apps included, such as the Mail app, the People app and a few others. One of the more useful apps is the Maps app. It can, with the user’s permission, use location features built into the machine (GPS, or network-based location services) to find your current location, integrated search for finding a desired address or point of interest, and built in support for directions, traffic, etc. You can see a screenshot of the maps app below:

Andrew Duthie and Program Manager Kirupa Chinnathambi from the Microsoft Expression Blend team join us for part one of this series as we take an inside look at how Blend can help developers design their Windows 8 apps. Tune in as they build a basic “hello world” application, add HTML assets and style it using CSS.

In this, the 5th, installment of Windows 8, What I’ve learned, I’m going to share a single line of code that can make your search-enabled Windows Store app absolutely awesome!

Start by enabling Search

For starters, if you haven’t enabled the Search contract in your app, you probably should. Unless your app is a game or other kind of app that has no content to search, implementing the Search contract will enable your users to more easily find content in your app, whether it’s running or not, and allow them to do so via a consistent UI that’s part of Windows 8 itself:

OK, perhaps not everything…but certainly all the options for developing great games on Windows 8.

Bob Familiar, who manages some of my fellow Technical Evangelists on our East Region team, managed to find time between updating SharePoint and emailing Excel files to do some really thorough research on the state of game development for Windows 8, and shares his results on his blog: